In ancient times, even the greatest bandits such as kings and conquerors, deranged knights and simple arch-brigands, used to lead their armies into battle. It would be unthinkable for them to hide behind; it would be so shameful!

The Queen or a lady of his heart would embrace the warrior, or throw her scarf at his feet, or collapse in real or staged grief. And the warrior, often a nitwit and idiot, but a warrior nevertheless, would saddle his horse, salute his wife and his people, and go to battle, proudly leading his troops. And the chances were he would die during the battle. Therefore, he would think twice before leading his country to a war.

Despite his frail body (he was barely 5 ft. tall due to severe scoliosis and of slender frame), Richard Plantagenet died in battle, leading his troops at Bosworth Field. Medieval leaders often belonged to a genuine warrior class. (Wikipedia)

There used to be great pathos in all this, and also, great unpronounced rule: you want to murder, rape and steal, then be prepared to spill your own blood and brains!

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Of course the priests and preachers hardly went to battles. While Christianity was often behind most of the outrageous conquests and crimes against humanity, its leaders were living a safe life in tremendous palaces and villas. Only those who enjoyed the actual acts of torture and rape went to the field. But the Christian clergy almost always consisted of liars and cowards, and torture was done in safety, far from the trenches.

Alexander Nevsky (Nikolai Cherkasov) declines a Mongol ambassador’s offer to join the Golden Horde. (Still from the 1938 film of same name directed by Sergei Eisenstein.) Nevsky lived in the 13th century. His main battle, fought on the frozen Neva lake, defeated the invading Teutonic Knights, thereby saving Novgorod, the young Russian nation.

Spain’s national hero, El Cid Campeador (master of the field), beheading Count Lozano for offenses against his father. Knights fought their own battles. El Cid, who lived in the same period as Alexander Nevsky, Russia’s national hero, was an expert tactician and enlightened politician who maintained good relations with other cultures. (Wikipedia)

But the kings, their marshals and generals went, and often died, like soldiers, in a bath full of blood, pus and shit! At least they died properly, like their soldiers. They were brigands, but many of them were brave brigands, nevertheless.

Look at these cowards of nowadays, those modern-day crusaders, the leaders of the Empire! Where are their horses, their armor and where is their courage?

BELOW, THE RESULT OF JUST ONE DRONE STRIKE, CARRIED OUT IN OCT. 2006 ON A SCHOOL IN PAKISTAN. 69 CHILDREN DIED IN AN INSTANT AND NO ONE KNOWS OR CARES IN AMERICA.

ARTICLE’S REGULAR TEXT RESUMES HERE

They don’t even think twice about whom to fight. They can lead dozens of conflicts, simultaneously. Because today’s wars are totally safe for them – they are like video games. Only those who are ‘targeted’ are at great risk. Attackers are akin to what Christians always thought God is: punishing, scary, spreading fear and demanding obedience, unpredictable. And normal beyond reach.

So they turned themselves into gods, or demigods, along with their chosen race, culture and religion… and their self-proclaimed right to control and to punish others, those who want to believe in something else, and to live their own lives as they choose.

Yes, the Empire’s leaders really believe that they have become gods. And now we only hear their twisted propaganda slogans, and their self-glorifying lies. They have become like those preachers and priests of the bygone eras: sadistic but constantly frightened, brutal and suspicious.

***

Mr. Obama, it is a pity that we will never meet: that I will never have the chance to show you what your ‘smart bombs’ are doing near Mosul in Iraq, or what crimes the NATO-financed and trained ISIL are committing all over the Middle East.

But you have an inkling of everything that I would be showing you, anyway, at least theoretically, just as your predecessors were aware about all those millions of men, women and children, massacred all over Indochina, as well as in Indonesia, Latin America, Middle East and Africa.

Killing with bombs is not the only way that the Empire destroys entire countries. It also kills through religion, propaganda and ideology.

Obama, the new-fangled tribune of the people, Barack Obama greets the overflow crowd in Denver, Colorado Jan. 30, 2008. (Chris Coleman, via flickr)

But you are, forgive me for saying this, a fundamentalist, a Christian Western supremacist, as all your predecessors were. And a fundamentalist has extremely thick skin, and he is incapable of feeling compassion. A fundamentalist has to impose his will and his beliefs on others. He may suspect something, he may even ‘know’, but he is unable to convert this knowledge into respect and support for other people and for other opinions.

This is also actually what Western Christian fundamentalists converted Islam into – they kidnapped it and re-created it into a reflection of their own image. The reason was to have some worthy enemy to fight against, and to have some justification for those war games and systematic plunder. And, most importantly, to have an ally in its most important war: against Communism, against Socialism, against social justice and against real progress!

A fundamentalist can easily become a killing machine, if he is not stopped.

***
The Second World War was really the last war in which Western troops were fully engaged, where they actually fought, although even then, whenever civilians could have been bombed, they were. Millions of women and children died during the carpet-bombing of Tokyo, Dresden, as well as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dresden’s devastation after the firebombing. (Wikipedia)The bombing of civilians is the true Western way of conducting war! Even the Japanese, I was told in Oceania, would always evacuate the civilians before getting engaged in the terrible ‘final battles’ against the US troops! Not to speak of the fact that Pearl Harbor was a ‘surgical strike’ against the US Navy, in which no civilian object was bombed by the Japanese, and as the old people who can still remember told me, repeatedly, the only civilian casualties there, were those inflicted by the Japanese planes that were shot down and crashed into the ground.

What followed WWII were not really true wars, anymore, but genocides; holocausts. All perpetrated mainly through carpet-bombing, through poisonous chemicals, later by enlisting corrupt foreign military, US-trained and financed death-squads, and most recently by using ‘smart bombs’, stealth fighters, cruise missiles and drones, as well as ‘Muslim terrorists’ (created in NATO camps).

In this way, new-era crusaders sit in their comfortable offices and war-rooms, and play games that are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives. After they are done murdering, they drive home, eat their burgers and watch sports on television. Long distance wars, as well as long distance killing, are like any other job: it is like selling insurance policies or cutting someone’s hair.

Except that countless human beings get torn to pieces.

***

Drone “pilots” in their control room. A glorified video game where humans, as Wikileaks showed, become mere “bugs” to be “splattered.” Where’s the honor in all this? (ABC News)

There is no ideology in all this, no risk, and no pathos. It is all extremely pragmatic. The Empire wants to control the world, therefore it murders, surgically, quietly and mainly without witnesses.

Those of us, who go to the places where all this is happening, now face countless obstacles, intimidation, or at the least, red tape. There is an almost complete media black-out. We go without any backup, without any cover, or support. We are out on our own. If we fall, then we fall – we have no organization to call, nobody to pick us up off the ground. We die, regularly. Selena, my colleague from Press TV died, covering the same story as I was: ISIL, and how NATO manufactured them. I survived. After that, someone called me ‘an armchair revolutionary’ and a coward… because I ‘only’ stayed in the Mosul area for two days…

Sometimes, we get humiliated, insulted by our own readers whom we serve faithfully, or even by those whom we considered to be the closest people on Earth.

Just as in ancient times, those few of us, are at the forefront, like Don Quixote, or like the scribe of Saladin.

We document all that is done to the world and to those poor people of the planet. We often work 8 days a week, 25 hours a day. Because there are fewer and fewer of us… Because what we do, has to be done, somehow; by someone…

***

And the Empire keeps on killing. And the citizens of the Empire have mostly no clue how it is done, or how a dead body really looks like. Or how the village bombed to the ground looks like. Or how it feels when some country loses all hope after being overrun by those button-pushing invincible boys sitting several thousands of miles away.

What cowardice it is to kill defenseless children and women, what a shame!

***

But it is not just children and women the Empire kills: it kills everything that stands in its way.

A few months ago I was almost killed by a unbalanced preacher in Surabaya, Indonesia. He said that he would, and he tried to liquidate me. These dudes are particularly malicious, as they or their ancestors, had already betrayed China after the revolution, and then they betrayed again, this time Indonesia, during and after the 1965 massacres. They have been serving foreign interests, they have been brainwashing people, and now many of them are going back to China, obeying orders from their foreign handlers to implant the ‘prosperity gospel’ and all sort of deranged Protestant crap.

Killing with bombs is not the only way that the Empire destroys entire countries. It also kills through religion, propaganda and ideology.

Its Pentecostal and Protestant implants have already caused great damage all over Africa, in Asia and all over Latin America, spreading corruption, ignorance and gloom. Only the strongest countries like Vietnam, China and Eritrea have stood firm and defined those religious inserts as weapons of imperialism and fundamentalist capitalism.

Entire nations have been ruined by the anti-Communist and anti-socialist propaganda, by dark nihilism and commercialism, by pop culture and by the manufactured ‘opposition movements’, those that are serving directly or indirectly the interests of the Empire.

All this has been done ‘remotely’ – entire parts of the world have collapsed without almost any Western lives being lost or even risked.

 I have already survived several attempts on my life, by those ‘proxy’ fanatics. The latest try being by above-mentioned deranged Surabaya preacher and a businessman (‘two in one’ human projectile), and much earlier, by Indonesian intelligence, while being savagely tortured in occupied East Timor. I had been condemned to death by the Peruvian military, camouflaged as Shining Path guerillas in 1992. I was captured and almost killed by that modern-day Ustaše during the Yugoslav War. I survived the Israeli shelling of Gaza during the Intifada, and all sorts of sniper and artillery barrages. And more recently, I survived the depths of an intelligence bunker in Goma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as a Kenyan jail. Of all of this, the Surabayan preacher was the most toxic, the vilest… But even him, I survived.

All these were proxy attacks – proxy operations, all conducted by traitors, by the lackeys of the Empire and of its ideologies, and religions.

I survived, but others didn’t. But at least those of us, who didn’t, including Selena Shim (covering ISIL for Press TV) or Hiroyuki Muramoto (covering a murderous attack by the Thai military against ‘Red Shirt’ protesters in 2010 Bangkok), received some recognition. Millions, tens of millions of ordinary, mostly ‘local’ people, slaughtered like cattle, have never even been mentioned by their names in any mainstream reports.

President Obama was certainly perfectly aware of all those ‘proxy wars’ and maneuvers, for years and decades before he became the President of the United States. His father, a Kenyan economist, was recruited by ‘Tom Mboya’ (Thomas Joseph Odhiambo), then flown to Hawaii, indoctrinated/educated there, and finally sent back to Kenya, in order to steer his country away from the possibility of a socialist path.

His mother’s second husband, Obama’s stepfather, and an Indonesian officer, Lolo Soetoro was yet, another recruit and a traitor/collaborator, serving the West. When he met Obama’s mother, he was undergoing training in Hawaii. Then, after the horrid 1965 US-sponsored coup took place, he was flown back to Indonesia (1966), and Obama and his mother followed him just one year later. They lived in the upscale Menteng neighborhood of Jakarta, where Obama is still remembered ‘with love’ by the children of other Indonesian anti-Communist cadres, as ‘our Barry from Menteng’.

I have lived in both countries – Kenya and Indonesia – and can testify that both of them have thoroughly collapsed, socially and morally, as they have pioneered some of the most shameful models of corruption and unbridled capitalism in the world. Not one Western soldier has died destroying them. They were conquered, plundered and made into submissive client-states thanks to great planning by the Empire, and because of the tremendous cynicism and greed of local collaborators: the military, the religious clergy, the ‘educators’ and the business ‘leaders’.

And so the drones are flying, stealth fighters are bombing, cruise missiles are crashing into cities and villages, and the collaborators with Western fascism are helping to oppress their own people, keeping them in darkness and in constant fear.

It has all been effective until now, but will not be, forever.

This system will not survive for long, because the arrangement is simply too appalling, and even the massive propaganda in the ‘client’ states” (and at home) by corporate media and by private schools, that manufactures unanimity, cannot keep people from noticing, that something has gone terribly wrong, that they had been robbed, humiliated and fooled.

In stark contrast to the cowards sitting in their gated communities or in their ‘war rooms’, all great leaders of progress and resistance, from Che, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel, Chavez, Morales, to Al-Sadr or Nasrallah, always stood at the forefront, leading their people in the fight against oppression, for independence and justice. They never hid behind civilians, behind women and children. That is what people expect; this is what is demanded.